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Dayanita Singh

Gardner Photography Fellow 2008

Dayanita Singh was born in 1961 in New Delhi. She studied visual communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Her works have been exhibited extensively, including galleries in Rome, New York, Berlin, London, Milan, Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Guangju and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

As the Museum’s 2008 Robert Gardner Photography Fellow, Dayanita Singh explored the human condition through images that began as a photographic diary and became the photographic fiction she titled House of Love. Although shot mostly in India, Singh says House of Love “refuses to confine the ‘human condition’ to a single meaning or context that could be reduced to categories like Indian Society or Indian Photography.”

House of Love refers to the Taj Mahal, the iconic architectural memorial to the beloved wife of a Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. For Dayanita Singh, it also refers to “a range of elusive meanings, some historical and some personal or idiosyncratic” to be teased from the photographs and accompanying text. Her work invites the viewer to dream of new meanings linking her photos with poetry and prose.

“The photographs ask to be read,” says Singh, “as if the book were a collection of stories.” The nine photographic chapters of Singh’s book are interwoven with poetry by various writers and accompanied by a set of original essays by Aveek Sen, winner of the 2009 International Center for Photography Infinity Award for Writing on Photography.